Senegal Taxi (Camino del Sol) - Softcover

"It's rare that a book of this kind is so moving and immediate. Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be."--Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR "The meter is on! Once again, Juan Felipe Herrera takes his readers on a double-yellow line crossing, edge of your seat journey that defies boundaries, borders or any travel map."--Michele Serros, author of Chicana Falsa: And Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard "It's an incredibly politically conscious project that situates the African tragedy back at the center of activist art, reminding readers that there's still work to be done to contribute to the healing since, by participating in the apathy, we all contributed to the damage."--Rigoberto Gonz�lez, author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa "The lesson is clear: one must endure. There is hope even for those that seem to be too small to resist."--Lauro Flores, author of The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature "Three children, two insects, two weapons and a TV--these voices take us to the deathworld of Darfur in this masterful new work by California poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. With the Popol Vuh on his tongue, the author of Maya Drifter stretches out to a present day inferno of murder, dismemberment, underworld gods, where only the trickster lives to tell the tale. A beautiful and moving book."--Mary Louise Pratt, author of Critical Passions: Selected Essays "While reporters can give you the what, when, and where of a war, a poet with the enormous gifts of Juan Herrera can give you its soul. He does this by giving us the voices of both sides. The Janjaweed, who boast about their horrible deeds, and those who are their victims. Among them children with no father, no mother, no food, and no water."--Ishmael Reed "Poem, story, mirage, and ritual--this book is steeped in the heat and sand, oil and blood, families and warriors that inspired it. Senegal Taxi grabs your heart as Herrera artfully writes with honesty, grace, clarity, a pulse on justice, and an understanding of the paradoxes contained in the act of being human amidst the struggles, tragedy, dreams, and survival which bleed from modern Sudan."--Devorah Major, author of Black Bleeds into Green

Juan Felipe Herrera is at his best in his first original collection in several years. In Senegal Taxi, Herrera brings attention to global oppression and injustice through poems that address genocide and hope in Africa.